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A friend of mine was on the QA team at Blizzard Albany and his complaints were straightforward: the pay is awful & the hours are long (especially during crunch)
by rychco 4y ago
A friend of mine was on the QA team at Blizzard Albany and his complaints were straightforward: the pay is awful & the hours are long (especially during crunch).
- bonestamp2 4y agoCrunch is likely why the gaming companies will throw everything they have at stopping unionization. The first thing the unions will do is get rid of crunch. Rightfully so too -- none of the programming jobs I've had have made me believe that crunch time is actually necessary. But, management has to plan not to have crunch time rather than rely on it regularly. Under a union, the gaming industry will have to give a lot more time to work on tasks that have a specific deadline that can't be moved (like tie-ins with external events that won't get delayed, such as the super bowl for example).
- spicymaki 4y agoThat is a good thing. Crunch time is due to poor project planning. Limits on employee abuse can lead to needed productivity innovation. Another thing that could help is if customers would stop buying AAA games that push graphical limits to unnecessary extremes. Nintendo has demonstrated what you can accomplish through good game design and less reliance on extreme graphics.
- bonestamp2 4y agoI agree. I hope unionization makes the gaming industry less toxic for workers.
- munk-a 4y agoWhen I was working in the gaming industry there were days we (on the server team) had overtime because the client team was behind on their work and everyone staying late was better for morale... but we were ahead on ours since we'd fought hard for our timelines and my manager was a badass. The result was we server people sitting around chatting in the office while the client team struggled not to be distracted, I don't think it helped morale.